Science Quote by Dan Farmer

Normal is a moving target, and Dan Farmer treats it like a moral trap. The bite in his line is the refusal to treat secrecy as politeness. He’s not merely defending “difference”; he’s indicting the social reflex that turns difference into something that must be managed, hidden, laundered into acceptability. “The whole idea” signals he’s talking about a system, not an individual slight: a cultural operating procedure that converts deviation from the norm into shame.

As a scientist, Farmer’s stance lands with extra force because science is often invoked to police normalcy - to classify, pathologize, and draw bright lines around what counts as healthy, standard, or natural. His phrasing flips that script. “Not normal” is placed in quotation marks by implication, framed as a subjective category that says more about the gatekeepers than the person being labeled. The word “secret” is the tell: secrecy isn’t neutral here, it’s an enforcement mechanism. It protects the comfort of the majority, not the dignity of the minority.

The subtext is political without sounding like a slogan. In tech and scientific communities, where meritocracy rhetoric can coexist with harsh conformity, Farmer’s distaste reads as a demand for openness as an ethical baseline. He’s pushing against the idea that belonging is conditional on self-erasure. The line works because it’s plainspoken but accusatory: if you think “abnormal” should be hidden, you’re not just describing reality - you’re endorsing a quiet cruelty.